I want to play a part in building a safer, more equitable, and empathic society—of that much I’m certain. What’s unclear to me is how exactly I should go about doing that. Where and how should I direct my energy?

My inclination is to build a relatively small and meaningful community, predominantly here in Maine. As an artist, it is the work I have been doing for years, and one of the few things still tethering me to a life with direction and meaning in the face of our slide towards dystopia.

I do this work first by starting conversations about and around the creative reuse of trash. Then, I  facilitate a collective exchange of those undesired materials and their stories, sometimes keeping and using the donated items myself, other times passing them onto others who want them. It’s a framework that pushes me towards other people, while also pulling them back towards me; their materials become my materials. Little bits of their histories get folded into my own. My art requires this contact. The proximity nurtures meaningful connections, thereby building stronger bonds and better relationships.

I deliberately designed my art practice to be responsive to this collaborative conversation. Community involvement isn’t just important, it’s essential to my work. With this reciprocal relationship comes surprises, which suit my process; I need surprises to remain curious. The story of how I came to use 35mm slide photographs is my favorite example of this kind of curious surprise.

In 2012, my friend Emma Katz forwarded me a posting from an arts and culture blog, believing that the following offer would interest me. It read:

Free 35mm Slide Giveaway: The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, after 12 years of unexpected absurdity, are artistically moving on. Meaning: We have thousands of slides from the 1950s–80s that have got to go. We are calling on any and all NYC-area artists to carry the torch and continue to create important art through these unique time-capsules . . .

Unfamiliar with the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, I learned that the three-piece band, consisting of a teenage daughter and her two parents, created wacky songs inspired by found 35mm slide shows. I was intrigued. At the time, I hadn’t the slightest idea of the extent to which this material collection would influence me and my art. My thinking then was simply that the slides were special, by dint of their association with the idiosyncratic family band and their bizarre artistic vision.

What I soon learned was that the slides themselves had a particular quality that ignited my own imagination in the most unanticipated and uncanny way. In my attempt to just examine the slides, I discovered a simple analog photomontage process when I put two slides into the same slide viewer at the same time. It was a rare eureka moment. As if by magic, surreal scenes with mysterious depths took shape. Tantalized by these sublime pairings, I proceeded to explore the potential of the medium. Drawing from a vast collection of source imagery, the resulting mash-ups became extremely diverse. In those early days and now, some make me happy, some upset me, and the best ones make me laugh. Their emotional tenors may vary, but they are all surreal—they make the ordinary world strange. This body of work, which I refer to as my Strange Histories series, is now a cornerstone of my studio practice.

My approach to this project requires patience and luck. The process of matching slides is paradoxically both slow, and immediate. It’s slow, in that it might take hundreds of attempted combinations to find an individual slide’s perfect match; and it’s immediate, by nature of the fast-paced and rapidly changing experience of rotating through new combinations; a procession of flickering visuals and lightly grasped contexts, which shift in response to every new attempted pairing. The decision to dismiss unsuccessful pairings is swift, almost instinctual. It’s a silent conversation in which words are an unnecessary collaborator, as they only slow things down. My internal dialogue to resolve and shape via language is put on mute, because language only leads to increased specificity, and I prefer that this work remain as transformable and vague as possible.

Instead, I rely on a honed sense of discretion, built up through practice with thousands of iterative attempts. Much like the addition of wave equations in math, some waves can cancel each other out, while other waves might augment one another. My task, as the slide match-maker, is to find the slides whose wavelengths sync up and elevate the combined composition.

When creating these collages, I’m at my best when I have a quiet mind that can register new inputs with clarity. Alternatively, if I’m too full of thoughts, I’ll fixate on some desired outcome, and be less capable of noticing unexpected connective threads hiding beneath the surface. As images disturb the smooth surface of my mind, the challenge is to then explore my perceptions of that fluctuating information. Trying multiple combinations forces my brain to behave like an energetic Rubik’s cube—twisting, turning, reorienting. Because I’m not anticipating outcomes, there’s more room for diverse meanings to emerge. Mystified by the uncertainty of what I’m looking at, my mind carves out space around the edges of the supposed explanations of the source imagery, knowing that it’s free to color outside the lines. I adjust the focus knob until my own understanding blurs, which permits a partial erasure of context, thus leaving space for speculation. Within that broader speculative realm, unbound by any prevailing perspective, I find an open invitation to parse out new contexts and explanations. The experience is not dissimilar from the way in which a sculpture asks us to observe it from all angles in order to comprehend its wholeness.

There is something inherently disruptive about blending other people’s stories by layering images from distinct lives over each other in the slide viewer. Slides are primary documents—true life snapshots frozen in time. The truths they contain are a steady counterpoint to popular historical narratives and history books, both of which can be redacted or rewritten. Slides depict real moments from actual lives, real places, and real works of art and architecture made by real humans. In our time of AI and digital image manipulation, their analog truthfulness is evident. So, what happens when I add two truths together? Is their sum also true? My process reveals it can be truer than we’d think, despite looking so obviously spurious. Strange Histories are bizarre syntheses that bring to truth an added dimension whose shape cannot be defined precisely, but only suggested by probability. They create a fluid space susceptible to the passage of time and shifts in consciousness. Theirs is a realm of nuance. They carry truth, not in its simplified, concrete form, but instead as a complex and evolving entirety.

I’ve found one key to generating successful pairings is to pay attention to negative spaces, e.g. a vast blue sky, a stretch of beach, an empty wall, a white shirt—regions of the composition that are less dense with information. A closer inspection of these blank spaces reveals how they behave like permeable membranes—critical locations where the barrier between worlds is thin; places where another reality might bleed through into this one. Through this function, the two unique truths of the overlaid slides coalesce to create a peculiar state of commonality: a shared truth.

Navigating this integrative exercise is proving useful, especially when addressing our current communication crisis, where instilled patterns of discourse inevitably lead us to intractable positions. To have a flexible mind is a superpower in this polarized world, where our differences tend to appear as flat, depthless contours. They lack dimension because, for various reasons, it’s hard to examine them fully. There is a shared sense that the stakes have never been higher, that we’re living on the knife’s edge, and that our way of life is imperiled. On this stage, failure to choose a side is considered an unacceptable form of cowardice. While holding firm to our convictions, we deplore the obvious threat of the opposition and prepare for battle. Our filtered vision seeks only to perceive a high-contrast visual spectrum limited to black and white: us versus them.

I yearn to see the world in more shades of gray. Recombining slides trains me to do so more easily, because it exposes me to countless scenarios I don’t normally see or expect—like a computer cycling through permutations of a simulation. By imagining potential alternate realities, the lens through which I see the world attains a greater resolution and clarity. Inevitably, my own ideas evolve as a result of this process, because with an open mind you can learn empathy through exposure to the circumstances of others, even if those circumstances are fictional fabrications. I find it revelatory to think that the lines we draw to separate ourselves from the other may not be as solid as we believe.

Overlaying one reality on another crosses otherwise firm lines; it employs chaos as a tool. I’m drawn to the freedom and limitlessness of this creative chaos. I strive to harness the constructive potential of uncertainty by mining the depths of past lives for mysteries and meaning. In sharing my discoveries, I invite people into my constructed worlds so that I can challenge their firmly held conceptions.

Why is this “graying” of reality important? We live in a moment when trolls are running the government. Chaos and destruction are both their weapon and their end game. To live at the cultural edge, like they do, is to pursue absolute isolation by pushing everyone else away—their absolutism leaves room for little else. They need us to believe that there is only fringe; that there is no middle ground; that our coming together is an impossibility.

But aren’t we all somewhat complicit in this division if we’re unwilling to see each other’s humanity? What does the “middle” even look like? If I asked you to describe it, would you be able to?

In the age of kings, when absolute power was unquestionable, only the fools and jesters were allowed to speak truth to power (and live). Absurdity was their weapon—veiled commentaries critical of the ruling class and the regular folks alike—omnidirectional shots fired. Theirs was a democracy of insults. With intention and sharp wit, humor was an emulsifier to stabilize the message and make it both palatable and memorable—a way to work between absolutes.

We need more of this absurd energy right now. Viewing things through an absurd lens enables us to bridge the gap to understanding the most difficult subject matter. If art reflects life, and what we’re seeing unfold day to day doesn’t make sense, then perhaps our art should become more nonsensical. It’s a useful tactic borrowed from the Dadaists, who employed strategic nonsense to question the nightmarish circumstances of living through the First World War. I, for one, find the pursuit of silly mischief both healthy and fun. I take aim at everything, especially myself. In most instances, the “King” that needs to be ridiculed is actually my own sense of self-assuredness.

While humbling myself is one thing, disrupting the minds of others is a different kind of challenge. The approach needs to be just right for the work to come across as both relatable and suggestive, without being insensitive or off-putting. The trick is to allow the viewer to recognize enough of themselves in the image. Once they’ve bought into the world you’ve built, you can subtly poke holes in their ideas and let different shades of light shine in. Hopefully they’ll come to understand that there are infinite interpretations, and by extension no limits to the range of human experience.

Rereading the Trachtenburg’s original posting thirteen years later, I’m dumbstruck by the realization that their creative relationship with the slides so closely mirrors my own. What is it about this particular medium that makes it intrinsically absurd, enough so to lead different creators down such similar paths? I for one certainly didn’t intend it, but I did come to recognize the slides’ potential—and harness it. As if eager to stay relevant, these outdated relics of an analog past exchanged hands for decades; near-forgotten stories in need of remembering. As the artists in possession of these collections, we accepted the responsibility of preserving and memorializing these inherited stories. But, like any good storyteller, we added twists of our own, playful fingerprints left as evidence of our own existence.

Somewhere along the way I got the idea to ask other people to imagine narratives to breathe even more life into this series. I found their varied responses to be endlessly fascinating: twisted fantasies, satirical rants, comedic romps, tarnished memories, autobiographical moments, poetry, and even a story told in cut paper collage. In 2018, I self-published a compilation of thirty-eight of these stories and the images that inspired them, entitled Strange Histories: A Bizarre Collaboration.

During the years I spent working on the Strange Histories book, it became obvious to me that there’s a wonderfully expressive power, not just in looking at this work, but in speculating about it, which is why I feel that it’s important that I continue to allow my audience the opportunity to experience that kind of rule-free world-building. The collaboration also satisfies my own curiosity to know what other people see in the images. Their responses provide glimpses of their inner worlds, opening a door to a sacred and profound place. I relish this access and the connection and understanding it fosters. Are we capable of seeing the same thing? To what extent do our respective truths overlap, or confound one another? Much like that classic optical illusion, do they perceive the old crone or the young woman? Maybe, in that illusionistic doubling, a viewer sees both. Or better yet, perhaps they see something else entirely.

 

Story Pairings

Jorge Arango, “I Am Everything”

I am the iron and the ironing board. I am the pillowcase that yields to the steam and the heat, un-creasing and flattening myself into a soft warm rectangle. I am the ironer, lost in the love of focused silent attention, happy to order and neaten the world that has given me so much. I am the brick hearth by which I stand warming my back, and the hands that laid the brick. I am this house, this shelter, as well as the houses of my neighbors, each an expression of a relationship and another manifestation of my being. I am the clapboards and the roof shingles, the meadow grasses during the last days of fall as they begin shutting down their biological functions for a long winter sleep. I am the approaching winter. I am the icy lake, the snow-covered stone walls and the bare trees on the other shore. They will all be here soon. I am the time between the seasons and the years and the centuries.

I am

everything

 

because I am separate

 

from nothing.

 

Because we are

 

each other.

Because there is . . .

 

only one.

 

Brandon Kaplan, “Nocturne for the End of September”

Tonight for once when I look at the moon I don’t see the face of a man or a calfskin drawn across the rim of a drum or a cataract in the iris of a great black whale as old as the sky swimming silent circles through the dark. It is something else every time I look and I have exhausted the possibilities of simile and symbol so I repeat myself just as it does every tidal day to find the night solitary again and purified of footprints standing in the way between us. In the quiet that waits at the end of what I know you sit beside me on the stone front step with my hand on your knee listening to the crescendo of trumpeting geese sail over the roof past the end of last summer when we laughed like lunatics vindicated by the wind raking oak and pine.

 

Reed McLean, “Greenwood Road”

Flying down the Greenwood Road we are at odds with each other. Me, silent and evasive, you, competing with the blathering radio full of bad news. I look out over the blank landscape, through the barren curtain of trees and across the frozen lake. Next to me you deride the state of the world and how far from us our dreams feel. I am taciturn and bland. You are exasperated and trying to make sense of it again, without success. Nothing you say matters to me. I roll my eyes at your cultural takes, your shallow observations of declining American society. There is no clarity or direction here and I wish you would just spare me, I’d rather look at the bald winter mountains, at the jagged rocks leering monstrously from the cliff face as we whip around a bend in the winding road, past cemeteries and median lines, and the empty cottages of skiers with their vacant sunporches. I close my eyes.

I remember it perfectly, the hidden house, the bend by the lake, a lake deeper than anything, deeper than meaning, deep enough to be nameless, deeper than the dignity of being named you float in the black water in the warm layer and all the fish below your red hair, your tight skin and the shack sliding in to join you. You are irresistible. Past you an island which is not an island but a natural jetty reached by the back road through the dark hemlock forest floats beneath the house of the rich woman, perched on the brow of the mountain windows open to the last light and the first, for whom the world waits patiently as she takes her share and the little girl watching who will never be anything else. The mud is soft on our feet and keeps no records as the cars go by and by and speed lives in our hearts and the Greenwood Road before us will go on forever though we both know otherwise.

Aren’t you embarrassed to be running your mouth? You are half smiling in private disbelief as I sit in unwavering silence. We are both starting to feel older. The road narrows until at the sharpest bend, it appears to end in the middle of the lake. I could seize the wheel and drive us off the guardless shoulder, through the spindly birches and down into the water. But the ice is thick, we would slide aimlessly across the white plain until spring, away from the Greenwood Road.